Book Description

This dictionary contains 20,000 English (eng) terms paired with Turkish (tur) and Northern Kurdish (kmr). It is extracted from our Words R Us multi-lingual data base which is built on Princeton Wordnet of the English language. Turkish, Arabic, Kurdish, Italian and other language pairs are available, Visit our website at www.wordsrus.info for availability of the other volumes. Turkish (ISO 639-3 tur) also referred to as Istanbul Turkish, is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages, with approximately 10-15 million native speakers in Southeast Europe (mostly in East and Western Thrace) and 60-65 million native speakers in Western Asia (mostly in Anatolia). The Turkic family comprises some 30 living languages spoken across Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Siberia. About 40% of all speakers of Turkic languages are native Turkish speakers. Outside Turkey, significant smaller groups of speakers exist in Germany, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Northern Cyprus, Greece, the Caucasus, and other parts of Europe and Central Asia. The characteristic features of Turkish, such as vowel harmony, agglutination, and lack of grammatical gender, are universal within the Turkic family. After the foundation of the modern state of Turkey the Turkish Language Association (TDK) was established in 1932 under the patronage of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, with the aim of conducting research on Turkish. One of the tasks of the newly established association was to initiate a language reform to replace loanwords of Arabic and Persian origin with Turkish equivalents. By banning the usage of imported words in the press, the association succeeded in removing several hundred foreign words from the language. While most of the words introduced by the TDK were newly derived from Turkic roots, it also opted for reviving Old Turkish words which had not been used for centuries. The past few decades have seen the continuing work of the TDK to coin new Turkish words to express new concepts and technologies as they enter the language, mostly from English. Many of these new words, particularly information technology terms, have received widespread acceptance. However, the TDK is occasionally criticized for coining words which sound contrived and artificial. Many of the words derived by TDK coexist with their older counterparts. Turkey has the 13th largest GDP, well ahead of South Korea, Australia, Canada, and Saudi Arabia.Virtually all the Turkish people are Islamic. Less than 1% of the population is Christian. Kurdish forms three dialect groups known as Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji), Central Kurdish (Sorani), and Southern Kurdish (Palewani). A separate group of non-Kurdish Northwestern Iranian languages, the Zaza-Gorani languages, are also spoken by several million Kurds. Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji) is spoken in Turkey, Syria, northern Iraq and northwestern Iran by about 15-20 million people. Studies as of 2009 estimate between 8 and 20 million native Kurdish speakers in Turkey. The majority of the Kurds speak Northern Kurdish ("Kurmanji"). Before August 2002, the Turkish government placed severe restrictions on the use of Kurdish, prohibiting the language in education and broadcast media. The Kurdish alphabet is not recognized in Turkey, and the use of Kurdish names containing the letters X, W, and Q, which do not exist in the Turkish alphabet, is not allowed. In 2012, Kurdish-language lessons became an elective subject in public schools. Previously, Kurdish education had only been possible in private institutions. Because of war in their homeland, many Kurds have become refuges in Iran, Irag, Turkey and Germany. Other groups are found elsewhere. The United States currently has a significant population of native Kurdish speakers as does France and the U.K. Virtually all of the Kurdish people are Islamic.